"To attend and assist the lecturers and professors preparing for and during lectures. Where any instruments or apparatus may be required, to attend to their careful removal from the model room and laboratory to the lecture room, and to clean and replace them after being used, reporting to the managers such accidents as shall require repair, a constant diary being kept by him for that purpose. That in one day in each week he be employed in keeping clean the models in the repository, and that all the instruments in the glass cases be cleaned and dusted at least once within a month." The previous assistant had complained of the amount of work that was required of him. It is easy to see that his duties were rather exacting and time-taking. Faraday did not confine himself to them, though he did perform them with great assiduity. His interest in experimental chemistry was soon noted, and he was allowed to take his share in the experiments going on in the laboratory. Some of his first work was the extraction of sugar from beet-root; but he was soon to have abundant experience of the deterring side of chemistry. Not long after he began his work in the laboratory, he had to manufacture some bisulphide of carbon, one of the most nauseating of compounds. He found it disgusting enough as an experience, but the study of it brought its compensation. It was much more than foul odors that Faraday had to encounter, for Davy was still occupying himself with the study of the explosives, in the investigation of which he had been injured the previous year. Faraday suffered from four or five explosions during the course of the first month or two of his employment. Indeed, the substance with which they were experimenting proved so unreliable in this regard that, after a second rather serious injury to Davy, further study of it was given up.